Laws and Legislation

The 2010 federal healthcare reform law made it easier for millions of Americans to obtain insurance coverage, but it didn't stop the cost of that coverage from rising considerably faster than inflation. So it was a welcome surprise Monday when officials at Covered California, the state's health insurance exchange, announced that the average premiums for individual policies in 2016 would be only about 4% higher than they are this year, and only about 2% higher in Los Angeles County. Mixed in with the good news for consumers, though, were some trade-offs that won't make everyone happy. The announcement offers lessons for consumers and policymakers, not all of which are easy to...

Related "Laws and Legislation" Articles

The 2010 federal healthcare reform law made it easier for millions of Americans to obtain insurance coverage, but it didn't stop the cost of that coverage from rising considerably faster than inflation. So it was a welcome surprise Monday when officials...

Last week, it was a movie theater in Lafayette, La. The week before, it was two military centers in Chattanooga, Tenn. Before that it was the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C. The mass shootings are like a steady drumbeat, and intermingled with...

Perhaps the leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles will learn a lesson from the May election defeat of school board incumbent Bennett Kayser, whom they backed, by upstart Ref Rodriguez. Unfortunately, that lesson may well be that they must back up their...

Justice Antonin Scalia is setting a terrible example for young lawyers. Ignore, for now, his jurisprudence, his famously strict originalism; it's his tone that's the problem.
I have taught argumentation for many years, first as an instructor to high...

It is unconscionable that California can't seem to pass a modest, sensible bill that would allow terminally ill people to end their lives peacefully and painlessly. The authors of SB 128, California's right-to-die bill, have pulled it from consideration...

The Department of Homeland Security announced recently that it would release hundreds of mothers and children who are seeking political asylum, so that they can await their hearings in freedom rather than in detention facilities. That was a welcome...

American criminal codes are a mess, and every year they become more convoluted, more likely to foster injustice. States across the nation are trying to clean up the muddle, but prosecutors often threaten those efforts.
In the 1960s and '70s,...

This week, City Council members will begin debating whether to make Los Angeles uglier. How? By eviscerating a proposed ordinance that would sharply curtail where new, bright, blinking digital billboards can be installed. Instead, they're considering...

If you have dipped a toe into the fetid swamps of online political debate, chances are you have encountered — maybe even authored — acerbic one-liners like, “There is a special place in hell for that so-and-so _______!” (fill in the blank with your...

Despite broad bipartisan support, legislation to repeal an onerous cap on school district reserve funds didn't have much of a chance in the Democrat-controlled California Legislature. The bill by Assemblywoman Catharine Baker (R-San Ramon) died in the...

While the federal government stalls on immigration reform, some states have begun acting on their own. Much attention in the last decade has focused on Republican-dominated areas that have tightened enforcement. Meanwhile, more quietly, California moved...

The best-known problem with peremptory challenges — a lawyer's dismissal of a prospective juror without a stated cause — may be that too often there actually is a cause, and it's an improper one. For example, lawyers have used their no-stated-cause...

Many Americans who find the Confederate battle flag offensive will have no problem with the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday that Texas was free to reject a specialty license plate that incorporated that flag in its design. But the 5-4 decision was a...

Texas and California are trying to reform legal migration on their own. The politics in these two states couldn't be more different, but legislators in both states recently proposed running their own guest-worker visa programs to get around the federal...

When he was a Los Angeles County supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky had a quip about county government that his successor, Sheila Kuehl, likes to quote: A county of 10 million people run by a five-member Board of Supervisors is absurd. Unless you're one of the...

In Africa, an elephant is killed every 15 minutes by poachers. That's 96 illegal killings a day. At that rate, the African elephant could be extinct in 10 years, conservationists say.Poachers, armed with guns and, on occasion, rocket-propelled grenades,...

From the mid-1990s until a few weeks ago, Los Angeles was home to the nation's smartest and most consequential municipal labor movement.
It was in Los Angeles that living wage ordinances and local hiring requirements for projects receiving public funds...

On the face of it, it seems absolutely insane to allow motorcycles to ignore the lanes on the road and to whiz past cars by going between them. What if the biker misjudges and hits a car because he's too close on one side or another? What if a car moves a...

Los Angeles County pays a lot of money to private law firms to defend against lawsuits brought by people who assert they were beaten, mistreated or abused while in custody, especially in the county's notorious jails. In order to adequately assess how well...

In overturning the conviction of a man who posted violent "rap lyrics" about his estranged wife and others on Facebook, the Supreme Court on Monday rightly made it harder to criminalize hateful speech. But the decision stopped short of requiring...